


Metathesiophobia

by temporalDecay



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, mentioned Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2012-09-13
Packaged: 2017-11-14 03:18:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Click-click-click</i>, goes Rose.</p><p><i>Tick-tock-dead</i>, goes Dave.</p><p>Three years, two teenagers, one meteor; learning how be siblings and not die trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metathesiophobia

**Author's Note:**

> Yay for non-linear storytelling!

A young man stands in the threshold of destiny. Or at least what feels like it. It doesn’t matter that he stands there every sixth day, shoulders slumped at a precise angle and hands stuck inside his pockets. It doesn’t matter that no lightning strikes, any time he stands there. No flood or darkness or any kind of horrible disaster seems fit to visit doom upon him. Still, crossing that door is never easy. You would think it’d get easier, after the first year or so, but nope. Every single time.

“David, _really_.”

The emphasis in that sentence is all wrong, because it’s not the _really_ that gets him, but the precise inflexion on _David_ that gives him disjointed flashbacks to elementary school teachers berating him for his glasses. Or his clothes. Or his propensity to dissolve into an f-word cluster bomb when the smallest things didn’t go his way. He shivers violently and crosses into the room, quietly closing the door behind him with a bit of a mechanical hiss. He presses his fingers to the cool surface, and takes but a twitch of his mind to steal time from it, ensuring nothing short of the other resident Time Lord will force it open. Privacy ensured and paranoia sated, he steps deeper into the room, where the owner of that wretchedly precise inflexion is lying on a considerable pile of blankets, cushions and even the odd pillow.

“How many times,” he begins, then stops abruptly. He sighs and wills his fantastically red – and godly – attire to melt into something more comfortable. Mundane. Slightly worn jeans and a t-shirt with a familiar slashed record in it. “Will you knock off the glare, now?” He snaps a little sourly, slouching his way to the pile before letting himself sink into right next to the figure now smiling beatifically up at him.

“I do not glare,” says the girl, who’s rather lovely, all things considered, and is beckoning to the boy to stop being a wuss and come sit next to her already, “it’s undignified.”

“Sis,” deadpans one Dave Strider, dropping the token resistance and letting her dig her wondrously evil fingers into his scalp, “you read Karkat’s harlequin alien porn shit.”

“Well, someone has to,” murmurs one Rose Lalonde, absently petting her not-really-but-actually-yes-brother’s head, “make an effort in cross-cultural understanding, I mean. Since clearly you won’t,” Dave begins to say something, but Rose casually scratches somewhere behind his left ear, and he promptly forgets what he was about to say, “and human-troll relationships are awkward enough already. But this isn’t about the sacrifices I make for interspecies cooperation,” and there’s this undertone of imperiousness in her voice that Dave is sure human brains are wired to obey unquestioningly, “tell me about your week.”

Because it’s been two years and he’s tired of having the same argument – and _losing_ the same argument – over and over again, Dave swallows back his protests, and instead does as told.

  


* * *

  


“I’m not the one that went shithive maggots, Lalonde,” Dave snaps at her.

A low blow, to be certain. Low enough he feels a modicum of disgust at himself for that quip, scant three seconds after it’s past his lips. Rose smiles at him, thin-lipped and serene.

“No,” she acknowledges easily, and for some reason the fact she’s not angry only makes Dave feel worse, “but you should have, being a Time player and a Strider on top of it.”

Dave scowls at her, though between his hood and his glasses, it’s almost impossible to notice.

“What’s that even supposed to mean?”

He feels every hair in his body stand on end, when she swoops in and manages to hug him before he can realize what she’s doing.

“It means I’m here if you need someone to listen, that’s all.”

  


* * *

  


“It wasn’t so bad, being grimdark.”

They don’t have a pile to do this, yet, instead they sit on Rose’s obscenely large bed and play a friendly game of UNO as they talk. It will take them several months to stop needing a secondary activity to get the talking going, but to be fair, they’re thirteen and in shock and far less sure of themselves than they let their alien meteormates think. If the trolls wonder why the squishy aliens keep wearing their godtier outfits no matter what, they keep it to themselves.

“Bullshit,” Dave bites out, not looking up from the cards.

“Wrong game, Strider,” Rose can’t help but quip, lips quirking sideways into a smirk.

“You’re deflecting,” he says, drops a DRAW 4 card on the pile, and gives her a slight glare over the rim of his sunglasses.

Rose has the decency to look mildly embarrassed – you’d need to be a Strider, her brother or Dave to notice – for just about two seconds. Dave’s poker mask doesn’t falter in the slightest, but he’s rather proud of his growing ability to throw her psychological mumbo-jumbo back at her. If asked sufficient times, he might even admit that is the only real reason he keeps this weekly appointments so faithfully. But then, he’s always been a fantastic liar that way. Rose draws her cards and sighs.

“…it really wasn’t so bad,” she goes on, watching him play a green five, and grimacing slightly at the patent lack of green cards or fives in her hand. “Didn’t really have to think about much of anything, but I think that’s mostly because the voices of Beyond burned most of my brain away.”

“You were angry all the time,” Dave points out, half smiling as she keeps piling up cards in search for the proper one to play. He says nothing when she finds a DRAW 4 + COLOR CHANGE card, not a single mention of the Light aspect which she rules over.

“Was I?” And something in her infernal drawl sounds genuine, and Dave doesn’t know if it’s because he’s spent so long around her, or because she’s finally opening up and learning to be less of a passive aggressive bitch. “I don’t remember.”

“Biblical angry, sis,” he murmurs, not really paying attention to the words anymore, only the cards. He doesn’t notice the way she looks at him. “Old Testament Wrath of God kind of angry. Black suited you nicely, though.”

This was Rose’s idea, obviously. And it was working somewhat better than anyone would have expected because she’d learned to listen to others, not just the sound of her own voice, in the last few months. She’s a very good listener, when she puts her mind to it, and very perceptive when she feels like it. But she’s thirteen years old still, and for all the maturity she prides herself on, she’s still _thirteen_.

“Really now, Strider,” she says, ruthlessly slapping down a red four on the pile, and going after the proverbial jugular rather than face the scary implications she’s not even sure are in the words or her mind, “must we really have the ‘is it really incest or not?’ talk right now?”

Dave chokes on spit at the word ‘incest’ and the rest of the session is spent playing in sullen, spiteful silence. No one wins.

  


* * *

  


Striders don’t do feelings.

Dave repeats this to himself several times, out loud and otherwise, in a vague attempt to deter a certain, nosy ectosibling of his. Striders don’t do feelings, but Lalondes do. Lalondes do feelings with military air strike precision. Rose doesn’t even look all that terrifying these days, clad in yellow and orange and _Light_ , with a touch of irony worthy of any Strider. She smiles at him, thin and wane and inviting, and somehow she manages to present herself in a far more terrifying way than when the creatures of the Veil scorched her Dark.

Striders don’t do feelings, and at this point, reaching this precious moment of respite, Dave Strider doesn’t really have anything else to hang onto but the increasingly vaporous corpus of the Strider Way. Striders don’t do feelings. Striders do cool. Striders are bros.

Striders don’t feel lost and scared and desperate and hateful, when they wander the corridors of a meteor full of grey, horned aliens and they are not supposed to bend under the weight of everything they go through. The world is not supposed to be able to come up with anything that a Strider can’t deal with. Meteors. Imps. Ogres. Denizens. Monsters. Unbeatable monsters. Dying.

Dave knows the problem, the biggest problem, is that Striders don’t die.

Striders don’t _die_.

Except when they do.

“You’re having nightmares again,” Rose tells him one day, nearly out of the blue.

“In case you missed the memo, Lalonde, we don’t do dreams anymore,” Dave snaps, tone a tad too brusque to properly hide all those feelings he’s not supposed to be having, because Striders don’t do feelings. “We visit dreambubbles, remember?”

“Which are made of memories, yes,” Rose arches an eyebrow at him, eyes pinning him in place with unforgiving insistence. “They might be worse than nightmares, actually, but I’m afraid there is not much literature on the subject given the uniqueness of our situation.”

“I don’t have nightmares,” Dave says, finally taming his voice into a bored monotone, “and I don’t have terrible memories.”

“Oh, Strider, c’mon,” she smiles and he hates the way she smiles, “you’re a better liar than that.”

“And you used to be a better therapist than this, Lalonde.”

Her smile falls. His frown deepens.

“Maybe I don’t want to be your therapist anymore,” she says quietly, tiredly. He pretends he doesn’t feel a flash of something _lame as hell_ , because Striders don’t do feelings. “Maybe I just want to be your sister.”

“You don’t want me as a brother,” Dave says, thinking of the memories he’s been relieving, hopping from bubble to bubble, searching.

_I’m a shitty brother_ , he doesn’t say, because Striders don’t do feelings.

  


* * *

  


“I never wanted a sibling,” Rose says, sitting at the highest tower of the lab, fingers curled on the edge and feet hanging above the void. “But I didn’t want a brother less than a sister.”

“Okay,” Dave snorts, not even trying to untangle that, and instead dropping to sit next to her, legs folded on the edge and hands hanging down as he leans in to peer down at the Dark.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Rose goes on, sounding oddly not-condescending, for once. “You had a brother, after all.” Dave doesn’t snap at her, doesn’t storm away, doesn’t scream in frustration. He grunts instead. “I always thought if I had a sibling, it would be a brother.”

“…do I want to know?”

“Want? How would I know? But if you must know,” and there was something in the way that she says _must know_ , that makes Dave wait for the delivery, “it’s because I expected a brother wouldn’t take after my mother’s passive aggressive displays the same way a sister would, which is to say, the same way I did.”

Dave looks down at his hands, at the darkness way below them. He can’t fall, now. Even if he does, he can fly. He can float all the way down there, to see what the dark is like, if he wants, and he’ll be safe. Rose leans back, resting her weight on her hands and tilting her head up, staring at the darkness looming beyond the glow of power hurling the meteor along.

“A Strider would have been a Strider,” he says, in the end, feeling oddly small.

The darkness has nothing to do with it.

  


* * *

  


“Kanaya kissed me.”

Dave opens his mouth, a thousand nasty little quips rushing forward and balancing on the tip of his tongue. And then he looks at Rose, seemingly indifferent, not even bothering to look up from her book. Dave isn’t sure when they started sitting around in this room, every day, at the same time. It’s nothing important, really, just chilling out and filling up the required quota of human interaction before going out there and risking troll interaction.

They’re not so bad, the trolls. Freaky fuckers, the lot of them. Just weird, grey alien children with weird horns and awkward teeth and bulgy yellow eyes. None of them even begins to scrap the surface of cool, Strider cool, but they’re chill enough. Terezi is probably his best friend among them, obviously, and Karkat is his favorite source of entertainment.

Rose usually sees it differently. Rose Sees everything differently.

He rolls the snide back into his mouth, ignores the sharps edges as it goes down, because it won’t do to realize that more than snide, it’s just disguised fear.

“’grats.”

Rose hums, busy with her book. Dave tells himself that at least no one that isn’t them would have realized exactly what just went down.

It takes him a while to realize what having their own language might mean.

  


* * *

  


Three years are a long time. Three years are a fucking long time. Three years are a boring fucking long time.

“I bet John and Jade are nowhere near as bored as we are,” Dave says, lying on his back on the plush carpet Kanaya alchemized for Rose’s personal room.

It’s a nice, plush carpet, perfect for lying on, and Dave has managed to not think why Kanaya would gift Rose something like that, because then he wouldn’t be able to lie on it and enjoy it.

“We’re not bored, Dave,” Rose replies patiently, knitting needles clicking along the seconds.

Dave has never told her how soothing the sound is. Rose has never asked him why he hangs around whenever she starts knitting. Both Striders and Lalonde dislike talking about silly, obvious things.

“Boring, then.”

Rose hums, and her needles go _click-click-click_ , which Dave thinks is way better than _tick-tock-dead_.

“Admitting to our deficiencies, are we?” Rose gives Dave a smile sharp enough to cut through steel. “I am glad you are making such progress, David, it’s very promising. Heartwarming, even, to see even a case as complicated as yours making steady progress.”

“Fuck you, Lalonde,” he mutters with absolutely no bite, rolling on the carpet to lie on his back, hands folded behind his head.

Rose doesn’t laugh – she never laughs – but he can almost feel her smile, so the only sound is the needles rhythmic clicking.

“I had not thought it possible,” she tries again, nine hundred seventy six seconds later – Dave counted, he always counts even when he doesn’t want to – in a tone of voice that makes him just a little wary. “For you to get bored of picking on Karkat.”

“Nah, you see, you need to give the little guy some respite every now and then,” Dave says, offering her a lopsided smirk. “Else he gets this freaky troll romantic ideas in his little troll romantic head, and we all know that’s John’s turf. Ain’t a brother to be nosing my way there.”

The clicking needles pause.

“I thought John had rejected him,” Rose muses in a casual tone, leaving the question mark implied in the slightest hitch of her voice.

“Oh he did.” Dave snorts. “Royally. It was a thing of beauty, you should see the log in Karkat’s computer—“

“Dave.”

“—but that’s not the point.”

“Which is?”

“A bro doesn’t nose around in a bro’s turf, even if said bro is not very interested in his turf,” Dave delivers the line with utmost solemnity, despite the fact he’s sprawled at Rose’s feet. After a small pause, he adds: “That, and I ain’t gay.”

“Well, I find—“

“Don’t even go there, Rose.”

There’s a moment of tense silence, before the clicking of the needles restarts again, almost as if to soothe them both.

“I was merely going to point out the hypocrisy of your so called bro code, when you are so obviously playing up your relationship with Terezi, often right where Karkat can see it.”

Dave seems to consider for a moment, frowning as he tries to pin down the adequate words. The rules of trolling obviously state that you cannot explain or justify the trolling, or it loses its irony quotient and becomes lame posing. After all that has happened, Dave Strider is not a lame poser. Eventually, he rolls to lie on his belly, chin held in one hand as he looks up at Rose.

“Well, that’s because Karkat ain’t my bro, John is.” There’s another small pause and then a hook of a smile. “And you, I suppose.”

“I am not a ‘bro’,” Rose points out, stopping the needles again and resting them and her hands on her lap, giving Dave a pointed look. “Do not try to be droll, it doesn’t suit you.”

“Well, you are, aren’t you?” Dave smirks a little wider. “Even more than John at this point, since we are actually related and all.”

After a long stretch of silence, Rose’s lips twitch. Her tongue is as snide as any Strider’s, but she’s never about speed. She takes her time composing her ass kicking and sass delivering remarks. She’s fussy about words and nuances and implications, the same way Dave is all about speed delivery and judicious application of a good, solid burn.

“So I should assume,” she begins, with the air of someone mildly offended by the stupidity of the inquiry they are being forced to make, “that the only reason you bother to keep some semblance of civility in Kanaya’s presence is because you are acknowledging the mildly disturbing ectobiology accident through which we came to be?”

“Yes,” Dave deadpans, then rolls around to give her a look over the rim of his sunglasses, expression bored, “and because your girlfriend has a fucking chainsaw and no real qualms to use it.” A beat. “Sis.”

Rose gives Dave a long, weighty look, and it has nothing to do with her title. Then she goes back to knitting, carefully keeping her eyes on each twist of yarn around the needles.

_Tick-tock-dead._

“I miss them too, you know.”

_Click-click-click_ .

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> _**Metathesiophobia:** N. Fear of changes._


End file.
